


I Can Feel It For You

by PythagoreanTeapot



Series: The Depth of my Heart, The Height of Your Soul [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Empathy, Gen, I Don't Even Know, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 22:22:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19473403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PythagoreanTeapot/pseuds/PythagoreanTeapot
Summary: Darcy Lewis had never had a soulmate and, despite what everyone seemed to expect, she was fine with that.  Mostly, she thought, soulmates seemed like more trouble than they were worth.Suddenly getting one without warning might just confirm her suspicion.





	I Can Feel It For You

**Author's Note:**

> I've been struggling to get into bigger stories, so I decided, spur of the moment, to set myself a quick challenge to write something short without knowing where it was going. (I almost always need to know where I'm going in a story)
> 
> I thought I'd try my hand at a soulmate AU, as something I've never tried before. But, possibly because of my lack of romantic tendencies, this did not end up being anything like most soulmate stories I've read.
> 
> Whatever. It was a bit of an experiment and I'm generally okay with how it turned out. So why not share it?

Darcy was pretty up front about her situation. She had no qualms talking to anyone who asked about her lack of soulmate. The initial reaction was almost always one of pity and discomfort. Most people struggled to find the right words, expecting her to be distraught by the conversation.

Darcy was well practiced at getting people past that, though. Sure, sometimes she had moments of sadness about the soulmate she’d never known, but after all these years it was just a part of her.

It had taken a long time to acknowledge and accept. The delay was mostly down to her parents, who hadn’t ever considered such a possibility even after they’d started getting concerned that she hadn’t noticed any feelings not her own. It was a teacher who raised it. Soulmates had come up at school before, of course. There were even two boys in her class who were soulmates, which wasn’t as common as the stories claimed. But it wasn’t until Darcy was 10 that they started the classes about dealing with the soulbonds. They got through three sessions - the whole class talking about how to recognise the emotions that came from your soulmate, not from yourself, and how to deal with feelings that weren’t connected to the things around you – before the teacher pulled Darcy aside to ask her some pointed questions.

Everyone had a soulmate. It was a simple fact. Sometimes they were romantic, sometimes platonic. Sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes people found each other early, sometimes they never did. But everyone had one.

Darcy had known it was odd that she’d never felt any emotions that weren’t pretty clearly her own. There’d been times when she might feel things she didn’t understand, and she’d get a painful hope in her heart that it was them. But as she got older, as she listened to her friends talk about the feelings they got from their bonds, she knew that wasn’t how it worked. The strong, clear, easy to understand feelings were the ones that transmitted easiest over the bond. She’d never felt simple joy or grief from her soulmate, so she wouldn’t be feeling complex, uncertain things she couldn’t even name.

Her parents had tried to tell her to be patient, that she was just older than her soulmate, that the bond would come. It wasn’t unheard of for soulmates to be born more than 10 years apart, but it certainly wasn’t common.

Even when that was the only possibility she knew; she’d started doubting it. It just didn’t feel right to her, it felt more like the year she’d tried to hold onto belief in Santa when she’d seen enough clues to know it wasn’t real. It felt like denial.

For Darcy, it was a relief when her teacher explained to her that not only could soulmates die before meeting, but sometimes, sadly, one might die before the other was old enough to comprehend the bond. If her soulmate had died when she was just a baby, she wouldn’t be able to remember what it was like to feel them alive.

It had felt like a weight had been lifted, some expectation that she hadn’t been sure she could meet that she was now free of. She wasn’t a weirdo or a failure for not having a soulmate, and she didn’t have to live in growing anxiety waiting for the day when the bond appeared.

She’d had one, and she lost it before she knew what it was. She could live with that.

Her parents were not so keen on the idea. They were romantics at heart and had found in each other the kind of love and partnership that every soulmate fairy tale strove for. They wanted that for their daughter.

Darcy was more of a realist. Her friends came from a wide variety of households, so she knew that her parents were in the minority with their happily ever after. And as she grew older and more insightful, she also realised that their happily ever after wasn’t always happy and still had a long way to go to reach ever.

It mostly didn’t bother her that she would never have that soulmate relationship that so many people spent their lives looking for. Other relationships could be just as good, she was sure. And it wasn’t like a soulmate was the answer to everything. Everyone needed other friends. Everyone had their own version of family. Everyone had to live in the world. A soulmate was just a tiny part of life, and she was perfectly happy to focus on the abundance of other amazing things she did have.

There was only one thing she envied about the soulmate relationship. The honesty. It was hard to lie to someone who knew what you were feeling, and Darcy valued honesty. She was always upfront about her own thoughts and intentions. She didn’t like hiding things, she didn’t like lying, and she liked the same kind of openness in return, which she didn’t always get.

The years it took for her parents to accept that Darcy’s soulmate was long gone were difficult. She struggled under the weight of their hopes, the repeated probing questions trying to find some indication that there might be something there they’d missed. Even when they started to accept it, they continued to look at her with disappointment and pity. She chafed under those stares, but she refused to believe what they did – that she was somehow less without a soulmate.

Darcy Lewis didn’t need a soulmate to complete her.

It never occurred to her that a soulmate might need her.

\--

Darcy stared at the numbers in confusion.

It wasn’t an uncommon occurence for her. After Thor’s whirlwind visit, she’d gone back to Culver to sweep through the last classes she needed to graduate, then she’d found herself back on Jane Foster’s doorstep.

She just couldn’t leave her pining friend alone. Plus, there were actual for real aliens out there. Someone needed to be looking into that shit and Darcy didn’t trust SHIELD to do that right. Not when they were untrustworthy iPod thieves.

With the pile of NDAs they’d had to sign, Jane’s funding situation still left a lot to be desired, but they mostly managed. Darcy was considering signing up for another degree purely so she could qualify as an intern again for the funding that would bring, though she wasn’t interested in actually undertaking so many more years of studying.

When they could afford it, Darcy was Jane’s assistant. When they couldn’t, Darcy picked up odd jobs to keep them stocked in pop tarts and duct tape.

She still wasn’t great at the astrophysics side of things, but they made a good team anyway.

“Have you finished entering those readings, Darcy?” Jane asked, wandering up beside her.

“They’re so confusing.” Darcy whined at her friend.

“You don’t have to understand them,” Jane reminded her, “You just have to type them in.”

Darcy paused for a second, frowning at her own reaction.

“Right,” She tried to shake off the confusion, but it only grew. She reached out to the keyboard, intending to type the next numbers in, but her hands froze before she could start. “Something’s wrong.”

“With the numbers?” Jane asked, leaning over to look at them.

“No,” Darcy grabbed Jane’s arm in a vice grip, stumbling out of her stool as she searched for the cause of her concern, “Something’s _wrong_ wrong.”

Instantly, Jane was on guard as well, reaching out to grab a nearby wrench as a weapon. “What is it?” She asked quietly, trusting Darcy’s instincts.

“I don’t know,” Darcy searched desperately for the cause of her suspicion, “I don’t –”

She cut off as the suspicion switched suddenly into panic and her breath disappeared with a gasp. She couldn’t catch a full breath. She couldn’t find anything solid to latch onto. She was terrified, confused, desperate for something familiar to offer some safety, but nothing she could see seemed to offer that.

“Jane,” She gasped, “I don’t know what – I don’t understand – I can’t –”

Jane’s face was blurry through Darcy’s tears, but she could see her friend looking around, clutching the wrench as she searched for any visible cause for Darcy’s reaction. After a moment, or an hour, Darcy wasn’t sure anymore, Jane’s face swam back into focus with a determined look.

“Darcy, look at me,” Her voice seemed to drift in from far away, “I’m here, Darcy. I’ve got you. We’re safe here. Nothing here is going to hurt you, Darcy, I promise.”

Slowly, the wave of panic eased slightly, and Darcy found herself gasping on the floor, tears streaming down her face as Jane held her in a tight hug.

“It’s not here,” Jane’s voice was firm, solid, without doubt, “It’s not here, Darcy.”

The confusion was back now, while the fear still lingered.

“I don’t understand, Janey,” Darcy shuddered, blinking around her for some kind of explanation, “What’s happening?”

“Just breathe with me, Darcy,” Jane coaxed a few breaths from Darcy before continuing, “You’re safe, I promise. These aren’t your feelings. It’s your soulmate.”

“What?” Darcy stared up at her, drowning in shock and confusion, “But, I don’t have a –”

She broke off again as her own shock was suddenly overwhelmed by a shock bigger and heavier than anything she’d ever felt. And right behind the shock was a deep, terrifying abyss of grief.

“Oh, fuck,” Tears welled again at the wave of despair rolling through her, “I have a soulmate.”

Jane held her as she wept, crying for a loss she couldn’t possibly understand. When the tears eased, and her breath evened out she lay curled on the floor, head in Jane’s lap, and tried to order her own thoughts and feelings.

Darcy was scared.

This was new, and unexpected, and she didn’t know what was happening. Scared was a reasonable reaction.

Darcy was confused.

She’d never had a soulmate. She was 24 years old. If she’d had a soulmate, she should have known before this. With everything she knew about soulmates, this did not make sense. Confusion was allowed.

Darcy was not heartbroken.

There were no deaths that she knew of among her loved ones, no lost friendships, no break ups. The worst thing that had happened to Darcy this week was that she’d broken her favourite mug. Which sucked, but it wasn’t worth the agonising ache in her chest. That feeling was not her own.

There were other things, too, that she could pick out as she pushed past the big emotions. There was a sense of wariness that was completely unfamiliar to Darcy, a tighter, quieter version of the suspicion that had hit her earlier. Some kind of hyper-awareness and distrust. There was regret, which seemed to come in waves – like it wasn’t just one regret but maybe a million overlapping with different intensities. There was a deep unwavering determination, or maybe a stubbornness, something that refused to budge.

She latched onto that one, pulling it into herself and building on it. She had no shortage of stubbornness herself. Had honed her own determination in the face of a society that expected her to be something she wasn’t. Stubborn she could work with.

Pushing herself up to sitting, she turned to face Jane.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” She told the scientist, “I read so many accounts about what it feels like when your soulmate is born. My parents used to force them on me all the time when they were trying to convince me that I had one. This is nothing like that. These emotions… they are way too complex for a baby. It’s like they just appeared as a fully formed adult out of nothing.”

“Maybe they did.” Jane shrugged at her, brain clearly ticking through possibilities, “Experts never could figure out what was going on with my weird bond and then it turned out it’s because my soulmate is an alien and stretching the bond across that distance makes it weird. The universe is a bigger place than we know. I can think of a dozen of possible explanations, and I know there are probably a hundred more I couldn’t begin to guess at.”

Jane and Darcy had bonded over having abnormal soulbonds. While Darcy’s had been non-existent, Jane’s had just been odd. With the lightyears between, Jane only felt Thor’s emotions when they were at their most intense and pure. When he felt just one thing so strongly it overwhelmed everything else. And by the time it got to her, it was dull and indistinct. Periodically, she would get vague flashes of something, but months would go by with nothing at all.

They’d spoken about it in the few days he’d been there. His people had more experience with bonds stretched so far, and he’d been able to reassure Jane that it was all perfectly normal when soulmates were galaxies apart.

She’d felt his grief, not long after he’d left her, and had somehow known he wouldn’t be coming back as soon as he’d claimed.

Darcy looked away, thinking about what she knew about her sudden, new soulmate.

“They’re so sad.” She admitted, “Like, full on grief-stricken. And it’s not going away. I can still feel it lurking, even though they’re trying to push it back. Wherever they came from, I don’t think they want to be here.”

Jane seemed to consider that for a moment. Then she hesitantly offered, “Well… Then maybe they’ll leave again. Go back to wherever they were that you couldn’t feel them.”

Darcy felt a little guilty for liking the thought. It would be easier. She knew she didn’t need a soulmate, and she was pretty sure they didn’t want to be wherever they were right now, so maybe that would be a win for everyone.

“Yeah,” She nodded at Jane hopefully, “Maybe they will.”

\--

They didn’t. Not that day anyway.

Darcy called in sick to her waitressing job and spent the day drifting uncertainly through the house Jane had rented. She didn’t know what to do with herself, how to deal with the steady wash of generally unpleasant emotions coming at her. Discomfort, doubt, loneliness, annoyance. She started a list, tallying feelings that cropped up repeatedly. She trawled through websites, mostly geared towards children, explaining how to separate soulmate feelings from your own. She fell down a rabbit hole of extreme and uncommon soulmate stories – people in comas, people with brain injuries, people with huge soulmate age differences. She left behind the more reliable sources and ended up in the parts of the internet with more fiction than fact.

She hoped they would go to sleep at some point to give her a chance to catch her breath and find some kind of balance. But as the day bled into night and she tried, not very successfully, to help Jane set up equipment, the unfamiliar anxiety continued to churn away.

Maybe her soulmate wasn’t in the same time-zone as she was.

After the third time she dropped something, Jane relegated Darcy to observation only, forcing her to sit out of the way while the astrophysicist did all the work herself.

It didn’t help. Darcy wanted to be busy, she wanted to be distracted. She wanted something else to focus on besides the emotions she couldn’t control and all the unlikely explanations her imagination was drumming up. But she couldn’t stop her hands from shaking, couldn’t hold back her reaction when a particularly heavy wave of grief hit her.

Most people learnt how to handle their soulmate’s emotions early on, but Darcy had never had to. She’d barely paid attention when the topic arose, as it would from time-to-time, certain that these were things she wouldn’t have to deal with.

She tried pushing them back. She tried clamping them down. She tried telling herself they weren’t her emotions as if that might make them go away. But the constant weight of it all was suffocating.

In the dark, cold hours of the early morning, when Jane had called it a night and gone to her own bed and Darcy had lain awake for too long waiting for some reprieve to let her drift off, she stopped fighting it. She took a breath and let those tangled, turbulent emotions overwhelm her. She let every nuance sway her, let every wave carry her further out. She wept, curled in on herself, shuddering with each gasping breath until finally, exhausted, she slept.

\--

The first week was full of the same struggle as Darcy tried to adjust to her new reality. She skipped a second shift but knew she couldn’t skip a third without risking her job, so she’d shoved her soulmate's emotions back as far as they would go and trudged into work.

It took all her energy to keep her hands steady and her fake smiles bright during her shift, and she was incapable of anything else on the days she worked. Jane was understanding, encouraging her to eat and rest, promising that she could handle the science on her own. Darcy hated how useless she felt, but Jane just kept throwing comforting things at her until Darcy accepted them.

With no sign of this stopping and no feelings of hope to suggest her soulmate had found a way back to their own home, Darcy began to worry that this would be her whole life. It had only been a few weeks, and already she felt like she was falling apart. She wasn’t sure she could bear this long term. If nothing else, she felt like the lack of sleep would kill her.

She’d just finished cleaning up the broken glass after dropping a tray of dishes at work when the duty manager called her into the back office. Darcy felt her eyes close in defeat, knowing where this must be going. Jane was on the lower arc of the funding rollercoaster and they couldn’t afford both rent and food without Darcy’s income.

“Sit down,” Lorraine ordered, gesturing to the only chair available.

“I’m sorry about the glasses,” Darcy jumped to the defence, hoping she could talk her way into keeping her job, “I know I’ve been off my game lately but –”

“I have anxiety.” Lorraine interrupted her.

Darcy blinked, suddenly unsure what was going on. “What?”

Lorraine smiled at her gently, “People sometimes have trouble talking about these things. Like it or not, there’s still a stigma around mental health. I think it’s important that we acknowledge just how common these things are. I have anxiety. I’ve been on anti-anxiety meds for a few years now and I’ve learned how to manage it, but it used to be really bad. I couldn’t carry it on my own. I needed help.

“There’s nothing wrong with needing help, Darcy.” Lorraine told her firmly, “I can see how hard you’ve been trying these last few weeks, but if it’s not getting better then maybe it’s time to look into other options. I know there can be a feeling of failure if you need medical help for these internal things, but it’s not failure and it’s not weakness. Medication has changed my life. Maybe it’s not for you, but you won’t know that until you talk to someone about the options.”

Turning back to the desk, Lorraine opened the work roster on the computer. “I’m taking you off the roster for the next week as sick leave. Take some time. Talk to your doctor. If you need more than a week, just let me know. We’ll support you however we can.”

\--

Darcy stared at the small, unremarkable bottle.

She’d taken Lorraine’s advice and had booked an appointment with a doctor. Not wanting to go into the weirder parts, she’d kept her explanation simple. Her soulmate had been through something traumatic. She didn’t know what, but she was struggling to deal with their reaction to it.

The doctor had been efficient and professional as he talked her through bond blocking medications. They would dim the feelings moving across the bond, in both directions. For trauma like this, he recommended they start at a higher dosage, numbing the bond completely, until she could find her own balance again. Later, if she wanted to, they could look at reducing the dose to let some diluted emotions flow again.

Then he’d talked her through the long list of side effects. Nausea, dizziness, fatigue, and more. By the end of the list she’d wondered if she was just swapping in one problem for another.

But she knew she couldn’t keep going the way she had been.

When the time had come to take the first dose, though, she’d hesitated. She stared at that little bottle, all the things it meant and all the things it could do running through her head. The guilt that she’d been trying to ignore rose up to fill her, and she finally acknowledged the reason for it.

Jane found her there, hours later.

“Did you sleep at all?” Jane asked as she shuffled over to the coffee maker.

“No.” Darcy admitted, distracted.

“I didn’t think the insomnia side effect would hit that quickly.” Jane frowned at her.

“I haven’t taken any.” Darcy turned to look at her friend, more than ready to talk about this. “They’re so alone, Janey. I can feel that loneliness every day. How can I leave them, too?”

“Darcy,” Jane made her way quickly across the room to take her hand, “It’s not your trauma, so you can’t fix these emotions from your side. The bond doesn’t spread the load; you carrying it too won’t reduce what your soulmate is facing. You know that. It doesn’t help anyone for you to wallow in their suffering and I’m sure they wouldn’t want you to.”

“I know.” Darcy squeezed Jane’s hand back, a determined look in her eye, “But I have a different idea. Come on, we’re taking the day off.”

Darcy jumped to her feet, finding some new reserve of energy in making the decision.

“We are?” Jane followed Darcy into the kitchen and watched her finish putting the coffee on.

“We’re going into the city.” Darcy told her, pulling mugs out of the drainer, “Remember we talked about going to the aquarium? Your friend said it was great. No more putting it off. We’re doing that today.”

Jane sighed, “Darcy, I get that you’re scared and worried about your soulmate, but we’ve tried distraction already. I don’t think this is any different.”

“This isn’t a distraction, Jane,” Darcy assured her, dropping her hands to the bench and turning to meet Jane’s gaze directly. “My soulmate is depressed. They’re beyond sad. They have that heavy soul-deep weariness that makes everything harder, makes everything feel distant and cold and numb. You know what I think the opposite of that is?”

Jane raised an eyebrow at her, “Is this some love conquers all thing?”

Darcy shook her head, “Not love. Maybe I’ll try that some other day, but I think the remedy to world-weariness is _wonder_. So, today, you and I are going to do everything we can to feel total, awe-inspiring, heart-filling wonder. We’re going to stop for every mildly cool thing we spot. We’re going to find amazing new things to marvel at. We’re going to look at mundane boring things with curiosity. We’re going to look at this amazing, unfathomable world around us with unfiltered wonder. Because maybe, just maybe, what my soulmate really needs is to be reminded that there are good things out there, too.”

And that’s what they did. On the drive into the city, she leaned her head out the window to watch the clouds drift by, wind in her hair, and marvel at the scale and majesty of the planet. She made them pull over at every look out point, finding hidden creeks, grand vistas, ancient picnic tables. They spent hours wandering through the aquarium, reading every interesting fact sheet, asking for fun facts from any employee they passed, quizzing children about their favourite fish.

With every burst of loneliness, every shock of grief, every swell of regret that came from her soulmate, Darcy just got more determined, more focussed on her task.

By the time they got back, Darcy was exhausted. The lack of sleep had caught up with her halfway through the day, but she’d refused to let it get in the way of her plan.

“I’ve got to hand it to you,” Jane followed her into the house, “That was a lot of fun. I don’t want you to get your hopes up about this fixing things, but no matter what happens long term, today was a good day.”

Darcy smiled at her wearily. “If my plan doesn’t work, then I can take the pills. But yeah, today was a good day. And now I really need to sleep, because tomorrow we’re doing gratitude.”

\--

It took three and a half days for Steve to realise what his soulmate was doing.

Given how long it had taken him to realise he even _had_ a soulmate, three and a half days wasn’t so bad. In his defence, Steve wasn’t very familiar with soulmate emotions. He still wasn’t really sure what were his own feelings and what came through the soulbond.

There had been hints from the start, of course; flashes of emotion that didn’t quite make sense. But Steve had never had a soulmate, and with everything else going on it had taken a powerful burst of love out of nowhere, a few weeks after waking, to clue him into what had happened. When he’d realised he had an actual soulmate out there somewhere, he’d been beyond shocked. He’d considered going to SHIELD for help, had even started dialling the number for the support team they’d assigned to him.

But he knew what they would do. They would go looking for his soulmate. With the resources they had and the technology available today, he had no doubt SHIELD could find them and bring them to Steve.

He wasn’t ready for that.

Steve had always known his soulmate had died young. It wasn’t uncommon in the wake of the Great War and the Spanish Influenza, and Steve had grown up with many children who had already lost their soulmates. Bucky couldn’t remember ever having one either. Sure, there had been some bullying about it here and there, but it had never bothered him. If anything, given his own limited life expectancy, he’d thought it better that he wasn’t a burden on someone else’s soul.

And now, when he’d lost everything and had nothing left to offer the world, _now_ he had a soulmate.

He felt guilty just thinking about it. The things they must be feeling from him. This pain that he wouldn’t wish on anyone.

He didn’t want to meet the person he had been inadvertently torturing. He didn’t want to see the pity or the blame on their face.

He didn’t want to know who it was that tied him to this time in a way he’d never been tied to his own.

So, he didn’t mention it to SHIELD. He did his best to stifle his grief, to prevent it from flowing over into the soulmate who had done nothing to deserve it. He focussed on what was right in front of him as SHIELD ran him through mental and physical testing, broad sweeping history lessons, intensive sessions on legal and procedural changes in the world, the USA, and the military.

For weeks he struggled to keep up with what SHIELD threw at him. Not because it was inherently difficult, but because it was so hard to care.

He’d lost Bucky. He’d lost Peggy. He’d lost his whole world. There was nothing left for him here, and he couldn’t see anything to hold onto.

But what alternative was there besides getting out of bed each day.

Sometimes, he could feel his soulmate's reaction to his own emotions. Resentment and anger would creep through every once in a while, and he hated making them feel this way. The guilt ate away at him. They were better off without him, that much was clear. The whole world would have been better if he’d just stayed in the ice.

But that option was gone, so he let SHIELD guide him through the main points that he’d missed. He rolled out of bed each morning. He ran until he accepted that he couldn’t run fast enough to escape this. He hit things until they snapped, or he did. He read the next thing that SHIELD put in his hands. He put on the polite mask that he’d learned for the stage to get through interviews and assessments and examinations from SHIELD.

And he wished for nothing more than a way out.

And then his soulmate had a good day.

It first hit him as he stood at the window of the cabin SHIELD had stashed him in. He caught himself watching the way the light played on the water of the lake outside, shifting and flickering. The simple beauty of it struck him in a way nothing really had since he woke up.

Halfway through his run, as he stopped to fight back the memory of Bucky falling, a wave of amazement stole his breath for a moment.

It continued throughout the day, and he couldn’t help the shot of jealousy that ran through him as the feelings kept coming. He should be glad his soulmate could still feel things like that. They were innocent enough to find beauty in the world. They hadn’t seen the things he had. He told himself that was a good thing.

But the envy lingered, because he didn’t think he would ever have that for himself.

It bled through, though. He wasn’t adept at keeping his own and his soulmate’s emotions separate yet, and he found the awe they were soaking in seeped into his own day. Colours seemed brighter than they had been. Things like the microwave and the smartphone, that he’d merely taken in stride before, now sparked interest. He found himself wondering how the security scanner on the front door that he’d used a thousand times actually worked.

It brought back the guilt at the things he must be putting them through. Thoughts of all he’d lost would still hit him out of nowhere, and it was clear now that the soulbond would be transmitting that clear as day to his soulmate.

It was good, he told himself as he finally drifted off to sleep that night, that they could still have a good day sometimes.

He should have realised even then, he berated himself later, but he certainly should have realised the next day. From tiny, passing flashes, to deep indescribable oceans, gratitude inundated him throughout the next day. In hindsight, he knew that wasn’t something that just happened.

But it hadn’t registered at the time, even as he found himself grateful for the help SHIELD had offered, thankful that the hot water in this safe house never ran out, glad that he had this space away from it all to process things.

The third day had been more subtle, which was his only excuse for not picking up on the pattern then. The soft, quiet comfort was less obvious than the intense feelings of the previous days. But he noticed, as he ran through the cold morning air, that he carried with him the feeling of not having to go anywhere. The psychological assessment SHIELD has set for him that day couldn’t break a heavy, safe, contentedness that seemed to hold him steady.

It wasn’t long into the fourth day that it finally clicked.

He knew when his soulmate woke up, a few hours after he did, by the sharp jolt of determination that he’d come to associate with them. It was one of the few things he knew about his soulmate: they were stubborn as hell. That was something he could understand.

It took only two bursts of the feeling in his gut to recognise what it was, and, as he did, he finally understood that this was not coincidence. The same repeated feeling throughout each day, the focus and determination underlying them.

His soulmate wasn’t having a series of good days. His soulmate was doing this on purpose.

His soulmate was doing this for him.

His own emotions flooded him at the realisation in a wave he could barely comprehend. There was guilt and regret that he’d put this on them. There was grief and fear about what had been and what might come.

But just as strong came the emotions they’d spent the last days reminding him of.

_Wonder_ that he had a real soulmate. Not just a vague concept but a whole _person_. A person who was stronger, smarter, and braver than he’d imagined was possible.

_Gratitude_ that he’d somehow gotten a soulmate so amazing that, not even knowing who he was, they cared enough to go to such lengths.

He felt their reaction to his realisation. A fierce satisfaction, a gentle acceptance.

The previous day’s sense of _comfort_ and _safety_ settled over him, and in that soft cloud, Steve Rogers wept.

He cried for everything he’d lost. He cried for everything he’d done. He cried for the beautiful, caring human on the other side of his soulbond who had to carry it all, too.

They held him through his tears with a determined feeling of love, acceptance, patience.

When he’d cried himself out, the feeling they’d been sending him today curled tiny tendrils through him, a vague, uncertain optimism.

Hope.

For the first time since he’d woken in this time, Steve didn’t feel alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I have thoughts in my head about continuing this. Many thoughts. But I haven't written anything else, and I don't make promises on things that I haven't done.
> 
> EDIT 22/07/2019:   
> There is now officially a sequel! (Okay, this is currently a lie because I'm updating this before posting the sequel, but there _is_ a sequel and if you happen to be looking at this right after I updated, then I guess just keep hitting refresh and it will show up soon). I still really like this standing on it's own, so I've made it into a series and the next part will be posted as a separate story. Even though that means I have to come up with a title for both the sequel AND the series (Ugh, titles, am I right?).


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